Review Summary:

Sparky’s Brain Busters is a fun game that will entertain middle elementary students while they review concepts from fire safety and Common Core literature, math, science and social studies.

App Info

Price: FreeAppStore User Rating:

Overview

Sparky’s Brain Busters is a fast-paced trivia game for elementary student (grades 3-5) that drills players in Common Core concepts in math, science, social studies, and literature as well as miscellaneous questions and fire safety tips.

Features include:

Three levels of difficulty

Single player, multi-player or classroom modes

Fun facts to encourage further content exploration

Fire safety tips and facts

Supporting information on developers’ website

Quality

Sparky’s Brain Busters is a high-quality app that performs extremely well and reliably. Developers included a clear and concise parent/teacher section with directions and explanations, as well as capability to manage multiple users. The solo mode allows individuals to play, multi-player mode allows competition between players sharing a wi-fi connection, and classroom mode sets up games for the entire class to play at the same time over a single wi-fi connection.

Education

Sparky’s Brain Busters offers a wide array of review questions aligned with Common Core standards in math, science, social studies and literature for grades 3, 4 and 5. Players spin a wheel to determine the next question category, then see a multiple-choice question geared for their level in the game. An incorrect answer simply sends the user back to the wheel to spin again. Correct answers move a counter forward and every third correct response allows players to collect one of the five characters to “win” the game.

The content questions at each grade level are well-designed for the intended audience, covering material in each subject area that is typically addressed at each grade level. There is a section of fire safety questions as well. These might be a bit challenging for some students unless they have had fire safety instruction in class or at home. The website offers ideas for this, and teachers/parents may want to consider providing this information for kids before they play this game. For example, one query involves how far children should stay away from the stove in feet (the answer is apparently three feet).

The Sparky’s Choice section appears to be addressing literature-based questions. Some of these refer to very current movies recently in theaters, so it may be difficult for students from other cultural backgrounds to figure out, for example, the name of Anna’s sister in the movie Frozen.

Entertainment

This app is highly entertaining. Players “choose” questions by spinning an on-screen wheel. The wheel has options for each of the five question types, and also has narrow “perk” wedges that offer extra time, spin again, and skip question. These specialty wedges really perk up the game!

Developers also gauged the audience’s attention span really well, and added good options for competition. Solving three questions sends the game into a new section of play, and that’s just right to keep things moving.

Value

Sparky’s Brain Busters is a free app, which is hard to beat. It helps kids practice important skills and academic knowledge and also teaches practical fire safety skills. What’s not to like?

Child Friendliness

This app is very child-friendly. There is no outside connection to the open internet, and competitive play can only happen between devices accessing the same wi-fi connection in a supervised setting. The only minor drawback is that children can access the list of users and can inadvertently delete users from the group. Developers may want to consider protecting that access.

NO external links

NO social media

NO in-app purchase

NO 3rd party ads

Sparky’s Brain Busters is a fun game that will entertain middle elementary students while they review concepts from fire safety and Common Core literature, math, science and social studies.

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